The Choice
by Coraniaid
Summary: After fighting through the Omega 4 relay, Shepard has to make a decision. In the end, what really matters? (One-shot. Bit of an experiment.)


"_... approaching Omega 4 Relay." _

_For once Joker's voice comes through loud and clear over the comms system. Despite everything - having the crew abducted around him, almost losing the ship herself - he sounds remarkably calm. "Everyone ..."_

Wait, what? _She has the strongest sense of déjà vu she can remember. _Didn't we do this already? _she thinks. But … no, of course not. It's just the stress of the last few days finally catching up to her. Understandably, perhaps, but she needs to focus. She needs to-_

_They're through the relay before she can finish the thought. Then for a frantic few moments there's no time for thinking at all: alarms are wailing, Joker's cursing and calling out instructions to EDI, the whole _Normandy_ is shaking and shuddering as her pilot steers her through the wreckage of dead ships that lie scattered about the orbit of the ancient relay._

_The base is guarded more heavily than she'd hoped. Swarms of robotic sentries lurk in the shadows of asteroids, drifting in silent vigil for who knows how many tens of thousands of years. It's only thanks to skilled piloting, months of preparations and upgrades and a lot of luck that they make it through the defences unscatched._

_It feels good to watch the Collector vessel burn. She glances at Thane, standing discreetly a few feet behind her, face as composed and relaxed as always despite the chaos around them. For a moment she feels like one of the mythological figures the drell is always comparing her to: an avenging warrior spirit, summoned back from death by a preternatural force of justice. _ That was for Alchera_, she thinks. _That was for Pressly_._

_Joker and the ship have done all they can; the next part is up to her. Up to her and the disparate individuals she's been asked to put together as a team. Perhaps not the individuals she would have chosen, at least not all of them; but she's spent most of her waking hours since her rebirth trying to forge them into a group which she can rely on, a team that can get the mission done. She thinks she's done enough. She hopes._

_As Miranda and EDI go through the hastily improvised plan, she casts her eyes around the room. She doesn't need to hear the details of the plan again herself, but she does need to see how the others react to hearing it. Some of them are impatient - Grunt fidgets with his assault rifle; Massani taps his feet irregularly in the corner - and some of them are calm - Samara sits meditatively on her chair; Thane seems lost in his memories until some sixth sense makes him turn to look back at her - but all of them are ready for what's coming. She flashes Thane a brief smile before turning back to Miranda._

_The Cerberus officer spells out the bad news: somebody is going to have to go by themselves through the ventilation systems while the rest of the squad approach in two separate teams. She's not surprised when Jacob volunteers for the vents. He's been in a bleak mood ever since the horrific scenes they witnessed on Aeia, looking again and again for a chance to redeem … something. She never knew her own parents, but she thinks she has some idea of what he's going through all the same._

_So she sympathises with Jacob, but she already knows who she's picking for this one. Not all of this team were foisted on her by Cerberus, after all. And she doesn't need the quarian's quiet reassurance to know that Tali won't let her down._

_Everything's going smoothly until Miranda remembers she's meant to be the XO and volunteers herself to be the second team leader._

"_Hold up, cheerleader," protests Jack instantly. "Some of us-"_

_She doesn't have time for this. Miranda wouldn't have been her first choice, but overruling her now would cause far more problems than it would solve. Besides, she's still not sure her first choice is ready to accept the responsibility. Maybe it's better to keep an eye on him for now._

"_Miranda's right" she says simply, cutting the argument off before it can begin. "She'll lead the second team. Jack, Garrus - you're coming with me."_

* * *

"... approaching Omega 4 Relay."

Joker's voice came through loud and clear over the comms system, for once. Despite everything that had happened, he sounded remarkably calm. "Everyone ..."

_Wait, what?_ She had the strongest sense of _déjà vu_ she could remember. _Didn't we do this already?_ But … no, of course not. It was just the stress of the last few days - of losing the crew and almost losing the ship herself - finally catching up with her.

She shook her head. She needed to focus. Everything they'd struggled for over the past few months … it would all came down to these last few hours.

Getting through the Relay was one thing, getting past the obstacles on the other side quite another. Joker and the ship's AI made it look easy, but she could tell from the tension in the pilot's voice how much pressure he was under. He felt it too.

Still, the base was guarded less heavily than she'd feared. A few scattered drones, lurking in decaying orbits around dying stars, but nothing completely unexpected. Nothing they weren't able to handle, between the ship's armour modifications and the heavy weapons they'd brought along.

And it felt good to watch the Collector ship burn. It felt like justice. Joker's expression - as she ordered the pilot to move the ship in closer to finish the enemy off - must have mirrored her own. The _Normandy_ herself - the new _Normandy_, not her ship, still not quite yet - was damaged by the force of the blast, but she'd have given up more than that to take the Collectors down.

As Miranda and EDI talked the team through their hastily improvised plan, she watched the team warily. She wished that they'd had longer to prepare; that she'd had more time to understand what made these people who they were. What was Massani thinking, as he brooded alone in the corner? Was Grunt remembering Okeer's voice in the tank as he checked and rechecked his assault rifle? At least Samara and Thane both seemed untroubled. She knew the asari would face the prospect of death with complete equanimity, devoted as she was to the pursuit of her alien code of justice. And as for Thane, well ...

The drell seemed to sense her staring; he wore a shy smile when he turned around to face here. She hoped that the time they'd spent together last night wasn't a mistake, wondered if she could really allow herself to fraternise when the stakes were so high. She'd make the mistake of getting too close to subordinates before - Horizon had taught her how painful an error that could prove to be. Yet she couldn't help but smile back. _This time will be different_, she promised herself.

While she was distracted, Miranda and EDI had reached the tricky part. Somebody was going to have to go alone through the ventilation shafts to let the others in. Jacob volunteered - _no surprise there _\- but even he had to know he wasn't the right choice for this one. This wasn't going to be a suicide mission. There were easier ways to get yourself killed.

Legion was the obvious choice - she'd seen first hand how tough the geth could be, how adaptable they were. She could tell Tali wasn't happy about trusting the machine, but the blunt truth was that nobody else - not even the quarian or their resident master thief - could realistically expect to outperform Legion on this one. And in any case, the geth unit was expendable in a way that the rest of the team weren't.

Everything else was going smoothly until Miranda volunteered herself to be the second team leader. Jack was the first to object, but she could see from the faces of the others that she wouldn't have been the only one.

She didn't have time for this.

"Miranda will lead the second team," she said firmly, "Jack, remember what we talked about earlier."

Jack nodded, reluctantly. It seemed like longer, but it was only a few days earlier that Jack and Miranda had almost come to blows in the Cerberus officer's quarters. With some effort, she'd managed to extract a promise from Jack that they'd put aside their differences until after the mission was complete;

".. and then," Jack had promised Miranda, baring her teeth in an expression that certainly wasn't a smile, "I'll tear you apart myself."

Garrus and Tali followed her down the ramp. And who else could she have picked? After all that the three of them had been through together, she couldn't have imagined doing this any other way. She watched Miranda and the others head off - Jack scowling and shaking her head behind the Cerberus operative's back - and double-checked that Legion's signal was coming through clean. Then they were off.

By this stage the three of didn't need to talk to work together. She'd been gone for two years, as far as Garrus and Tali were concerned, but they'd fallen right back into their old patterns in remarkably little time. Tali took point, shields at full strength and shotgun ready to fire, drone orbiting around her slowly. Garrus was a silent shadow at their rear, eyes constantly scanning the alien geometries they walked through for new threats, new targets.

As they advanced she could still hear the voice echoing in her head: threatening, taunting, boasting. The same voice she'd heard back on Horizon, and then again on the Collector ship. The agency behind the Collectors, presumably. Or maybe she was just losing her mind. She'd never quite dared to ask if anybody else could hear it. _Too late now_. She wasn't quite sure whose thought that was.

And that was when the first wave of Collectors came charging at them through the gloom.

Whether they could hear the voice or not, the others could certainly see the glow as first one then another Collector was possessed by their leader. It had been terrifying the first time - by this point it had almost become routine. A problem to be dealt with, rather than anything to be feared.

Tali hacked through the enemies' defences, her drone buzzing relentless about them. As their shields failed, Garrus picked them off one by one, shots ringing out from his sniper rifle with ruthless precision ("Scoped and dropped!" he crowed, not for the first time). Meanwhile she improvised, as she always had, mixing tech skills and biotics as required by circumstance.

One of the Collectors staggered through Tali's defences, claws reaching out to clasp the quarian: she tore apart what was left of the creature's carapace with a warping blast of biotic energy. The others began to pull back, preparing for another assault: she hurled a grenade into their midst, then turned back to help Tali strengthen the shields.

"Temperature levels rising."

The geth didn't panic, but for a minute she could have sworn otherwise. She slammed into the last bulkhead, fingers scrambling for the locks, and forced the ventilation shaft open. Miranda's team had already reached their own side of the doors, hurrying in to join them as Legion released the last of the central locks. As the geth stumbled past, she allowed herself a few seconds to catch her breath, to reassure herself that they'd all made it. It was only the first step, but they were through the doors.

For a second, her vision blurred and she could have sworn she saw Miranda turn to shout out orders at Tali, who had somehow managed to get ahead of them. Frowning, she looked back over her shoulder. Tali and Garrus were there behind, right where they should have been. "Keep it together, kid," she muttered to herself under her breath. She missed Captain Anderson.

The chamber was huge, she realised. Bigger than almost any other manufactured space she'd seen before, except perhaps for those on the Citadel or Illos. And the walls were lined with what look like glass columns, filled with tiny shadows. Shadows which, on closer inspection, turned out to be people. Or what was left of them, anyway.

_This place is a morgue_, she thought grimly. A wide open cavern, full of lifeless frozen bodies in glass coffins. All human. The missing colonists. _So many,_ she thought in disbelief. _I hadn't thought-_

Then one of the bodies opened its eyes and started to scream.

* * *

_The colonists are eaten alive in front of her eyes, consumed by what look like swarms of alien locusts, and there's nothing she can do to stop it. There's nothing that any of them can do but watch._

_Over the radio she think she can hear Tali throwing up inside her suit. She doesn't blame her. But even as she struggles with own instinctive disgust, a part of her is watching dispassionately; thinking, analysing. The part of her that kept her safe growing up on the streets, asking questions, playing out percentages. _What are the chances that this happened just now by happenstance? _it asks her now, forcing her to think about the odds._

_The colonists must have been here for a while, she thinks. Hours, if they'd just be dropped off by the Collector ship they'd fought. Days or weeks, based on the last report of abductions they'd heard. So if the Collectors were going to kill them, why did it happen now, just when they were on the verge of rescue?_

_The voice - it calls itself 'Harbinger', she thinks. It's been taunting her, mocking her, every since she first heard it on Horizon. It _planned_ this, she realises. Kept these colonists alive, just in case. It waited for her to arrive, then murdered them while she watched, helpless. This was deliberate, something intended to hurt, to break her resolve._

_She doesn't know where or what this Harbinger is, but one day she's going to kill it. _Today, with any luck.

"_Over here, Commander," calls Miranda urgently._

_There are more people here, trapped behind panels of glass, hooked up into the system of tubes and webbing that - she now realises - spiral through the chamber walls like veins.. More colonists, she thinks at first, until she lets herself look at one of them more closely. She's half-afraid that these people will die as soon as Harbinger catches her paying attention. As she starts to hope._

_But she recognises the woman behind the glass. It's Chambers._

_She forces herself to focus. The colonists are dead, but the crew - her crew - are still alive. And even if they weren't, there's still the mission. Always the mission._

_She shouts out orders to the rest of her team. Miranda and Jacob are already springing into action, hammering against the glass and searching for switches. Soon the others are at it too, forcing the screens to open and pulling the crew free. Doctor Chakwas is the last one out, Massani offering her an arm as she steps carefully down to the ground._

_She's glad to see her friend in one piece; one more link to a memory of happier times. The normally unshakeable doctor seems close to panic now. She can't blame her. It's only by concentrating on the task at her hand that she can stay focused herself._

_And now there are more decisions to be made._

_For a start, somebody has to help the crew back to the ship. Even without Chakwas saying anything, it's obvious that they're in no position to fight after the ordeal they've been through. And some of them will have to fight past the seeker swarms waiting in the pathways above, blocking them from opening the doors that lead into the main control chamber._

_It's a dangerous route, and Mordin's counter-measures won't be effective against so many._

_They debate futilely for a few minutes, tossing half-thought ideas back and forth. Then-_

"_What about biotics?" she suggests,. "Could we … I don't know, make a shield to keep the swarm off us?"_

_Not for the first time in her life, she wishes she trained harder as a biotic. But when her biotics first developed, she was busy trying to survive and . Then there was boot camp, her first tour, engineer training. And after Elysium there was N7 and officer training. There was always something else to do, and now there's no time left at all._

_Still, she's far from the only biotic here. She turns her attention to Samara, watches as the Justicar frowns in thought._

"_I think it may be possible," the asari replies._

* * *

"...in theory, any biotic could handle it," agreed Miranda, looking pointedly at Jack.

She doubted that any biotic could do it - she wasn't sure she could, even with the new implants Cerberus had provided her with. She'd always trusted more in her knowledge of tech and machinery than the strange ability to manipulate dark energy and mass effect fields. Machines made sense, in a way that the strange powers she'd suddenly woken up with the summer before joining the Alliance military never had.

Still, she was far from the only biotic here. Between Miranda, Jack, Jacob, Samara and Thane, she had plenty of talent to choose from.

In the end she decided to play it safe She sent Mordin back with Doctor Chakwas and the rest of the crew, left Jacob in charge of the others and took only a small team with her to distract the seeker swarms. Thane was a silent ghost at her right hand side, and Miranda led the way, frowning slightly in concentration.

For a strange moment, she imagined that Jacob was with them, striding behind Thane with a grim expression on his face. This was exactly the sort of thing he would have volunteered for, of course, if she'd given him a chance. But she hadn't - she'd decided his talents were better suited to leading a team. As a former Alliance solider and a Corsair, she trusted him to be able to keep a squad together.

She blinked, and when she looked again the image of Jacob had vanished from sight.

All that she could see behind Thane was a solid cloud of swarming seekers, buzzing and battering against the limits of Miranda's shield. The swarm was angry, she decided. The swarm - or whatever agency that was controlling them.

On cue, she felt the familiar voice echoing in her head. _**Overwhelm them**_.

Collectors loomed out from the darkness ahead, weapons raised, faces blank. She and Thane fell into now-familiar patterns, fighting together as if they'd worked together for years, while Miranda watched on helplessly, all her efforts devoted to keeping intact the biotic shield that was keeping them all alive.

But Miranda wasn't needed; the Collectors were no match for her and Thane. She kept half an eye on the drell as they fought, watching the way he moved: admiring his effortless efficiency: no movement wasted or out of place. He glanced up in her direction once, eyes flickered, then he fired twice. She knew that behind her, outside the safety of Miranda's shield, two Collectors had fallen.

Her own style was less focused, more pragmatic; a machete to Thane's surgical scalpel. A Collector lifted up on wings into the air and she brought it down with a series of barely controlled biotic blasts, warping its armour and tearing apart its insectoid limbs. Another trained its weapon on Miranda and she fried its circuits and its shields with an electronic pulse before a single shot from the drell's rifle sent it sprawling.

Then the last Collector was dead, Harbinger's voice had fallen silent and the only sound was the relentless buzzing of the swarm. They were almost at the doors now, just a few-

"Commander, I …"

Miranda's voice was suddenly taut, full of barely-controlled tension. She just had time to see the sheen of sweat on the Cerberus officer's face, to notice the growing panic in her eyes, to watch the biotic glow that surrounded them dim and flicker, to think _oh shit, she's not going to make it_...

Then the shield fell away, and the darkness fell on them. The bulk of the seekers headed right for her, chittering furiously - but even as she braced herself for the inevitable something behind her pushed her unceremoniously down to the ground. Stunned, she twisted herself around and stared up at the drell standing above her for a single frozen second. And then the swarm was on him, biting and battering.

Thane didn't say a word as he died.

* * *

"_Let's go, 'Commander'."_

_She shakes her head to clear another attack of … whatever. Thane isn't here. Why did she think he was?_

_Jack's drawl is as sardonic as ever, but something in her eyes has changed for the better. The younger woman almost looks … happy. She's glad now that she listened to whatever instinct suggested she second-guess herself and ignore Miranda's advice. Not that Jack's biotic skills were ever in any doubt. Just her attitude._

_By her side, Jacob fights with a silent intensity. She'd almost sent him back with the Chakwas and the rest of the crew, in truth, but that same strange sense had persuaded her to send Miranda instead. Besides, this was where Jacob wanted to be: on the frontlines, making a difference for the better. She didn't want to deny him that._

_A few yards from the final door - after fighting through Collectors for what must surely have been only minutes, not the hours it felt like - Jack turns to face the mass of seekers swarming behind them. With obvious effort, she gathers strength from a reserve she hadn't realised the former convict possessed and - snarling curses nobody else can hear - expands her shield immensely, forcing the seekers screeching backwards in pain. By her side, Jacob shakes his head in appreciation, and she can only nod._

_She knows with certainty that she couldn't have done that. Nor could Jacob or Kaidan or almost any of the other human biotics she's served with. Maybe an asari, she allows. The asari Spectre she'd fought on Ilium, perhaps, or Samara herself._

_She's thrown from her moment of introspection by the noise of the intercom. Heavy static drowns out most of whatever Massani is trying to say. But somehow she knows it's bad news. _

_Sure enough, when they manage to get the door open, she sees that the Collectors haven't been idle here. One of the team is down, lying awkwardly on their back at the far edge of the chamber.. _

_It's Thane. He's … _oh no. No. Please.

"_I hear it …" - he coughs feebly, eyes struggling to stay focused on hers - ".. the sea."_

_She doesn't know what to say. She recalls him praying once, a prayer to the almost forgotten gods of the drell. Not the Enkindlers of the hanar, the half mythical Protheans of legend, but the old gods the drell had once worshipped in the arid deserts of Rakhana. _Kalahira, mistress of inscrutable depths, I ask for … _what? It would have to be something important, she thinks, to presume to trouble a god. _Not like this_, she prays. _Not here, not now. Not him.

_Perhaps a drell's prayers are more effective. Then again, given the fate of Rakhana, perhaps they are not._

_Each breath Thane takes seems to come harder than the one before. For a moment she thinks she's lost him to his memories, that he's disappeared into the solipsism he once told her about, reliving memories of happier times. Memories of his wife, of the child he'd given up to hunt his wife's killer, or of the son he'd only just begun to reconnect with. Maybe that would have been a kinder end. Instead she sees him blink back tears, forcing himself to smile up at her one last time despite the pain._

"_You look beautiful, my siha," he whispers, dying._

* * *

She'd had a speech ready for this moment, just in case. Two, actually. Something to cover multiple options. That was what people expected of the Lion of Elysium, wasn't it? Pretty words, rousing speeches, heroic stands ... then a brisk march home to collect another medal and the next set of orders.

Well, _fuck_ that.

That woman was long dead, she decided. Whatever parts of her had survived the geth attack on Eden Prime, whatever remnants had survived Virmire and the senseless waste of the Battle of the Citadel ... whatever was left of the Lion of Elysium had taken her last breaths in the upper atmosphere of Alchera; suffocating silently, alone in the cold and in the dark.

The person who'd woken up on Miranda's operating table two years later - she was somebody new. Somebody different. Somebody the Reapers couldn't predict; somebody the galaxy couldn't hurt. People who'd known her before might not be able to accept it, but she had to be willing to face the truth. Dead was dead, and nobody who'd died had ever come back. She'd known that since she was a child, or rather - she caught herself - the dead woman had known it, and she had inherited (stolen?) those memories when she was born on Lazarus station.

She still wasn't sure what Cerberus had been thinking, throwing away billions of credits to try to piece together the corpse of a woman who'd hated them for as long as she'd known of them. What did they want - a puppet, a figurehead? But what use did a covert terrorist group have for a figurehead? Was there something else that the Illusive Man wanted from her - the memories of the Cipher she'd gained on Feros, perhaps, or some hidden secrets of the Protheans she'd gained from their lost beacons? If there was, he'd not made it obvious. But it troubled her all the same. Was he after something he'd realised she'd no longer had? _Was this all just a mistake?_

Maybe Miranda would have been able to tell her. But she wasn't likely to have a chance to ask her now. The Cerberus officer had barely dared to glance in her direction once they'd made it inside. Her second, smaller shield had held just long enough to get them to the doors, then Miranda had departed - fled - to the far side of the room, speaking to Jacob, Massani, to anyone but her.

She'd only made eye contact once; in passing, Miranda glancing towards her in the middle of a long whispered conversation with Kasumi.

She'd expected to see guilt in the other woman's eyes. She hadn't expected to see fear. Lawson was afraid of her, of what she'd do.

She didn't know if that meant the Cerberus officer didn't understand her, or that she understood her all too well.

_I guess if we both make it out of here alive we'll get to see which it is_, she thought grimly.

She blamed herself. She'd been - the other her had been - a better judge of character before Alchera. Samara would have been the safer choice. Why was that so obvious now, when it hadn't been before? What edge, what talent had she lost that Cerberus had expected her to have?

She found it hard to place her feelings for the dead woman whose name and fare she'd woken up with. She'd had it rough - growing up orphaned on the streets, running with the Reds, seeing squadmates dying on alien battlefields - but she'd managed to make something of what she'd been given. A reputation, a life. She'd lived well, and she'd died fighting. She envied her, at least a little. She didn't think that she would have wanted to be mourned.

And as for the friends who she'd left behind - well, they'd deserved better, but wasn't that always the way? Chakwas, Joker, Tali and Garrus - they'd all been with her, from almost the very beginning. She felt lucky to have known them, even if she didn't have a right to call them her own. She hoped they'd manage to beat the odds.

_Good luck, Garrus_, she thought, briefly locking eyes with the scarred and silent turian. _Somebody has to keep Tali and the others safe, and I don't know if I can do that anymore. If you make it out, and I don't, I hope one day you realise that you're more than your worst mistakes. Sidonis won't define you. Not unless you let him._

She didn't say any of that though. A simple nod would have to do, one wounded soldier to another. She didn't trust herself to speak anyway.

Legion and Grunt trailed her silently as she stepped onto the waiting platform. She'd fought - or at least, she remembered the experience of fighting - hundreds of geth, killed dozens of krogan. It still felt strange to be going into battle alongside them. They're weren't friends, weren't truly allies. She didn't trust them the way she trusted Garrus or Tali, she couldn't relate to Grunt the way her predecessor had begun to warm to Wrex back on the original _Normandy_.

She'd remembered telling the old krogan on Virmire that Saren's genophage 'cure' couldn't trusted, that all the renegade Spectre was looking for from his cloned troops were mindless weapons. Was that all she'd sought in Okeer's 'perfect krogan', all she saw in the strange synthetic being that had travelled halfway across a galaxy to find her?

Perhaps it was, she admitted to herself. Perhaps weapons were what the galaxy needed now. Well, so be it. She could be a weapon too.

It was time to end this. One way or another, it was time for everything to be decided.

* * *

"_The Collectors, the Reapers - they're a threat to … to everything," she says, suddenly aware of the silent faces staring up at her. Hell, she's improvising already. _Never a good sign. Time to wrap it up._ "This is where everything will be decided. Make yourselves proud."_

_In a few minutes' time this space outside is going to be swarming with Collectors. She isn't sure if she's going to see any of these people alive again. She strides pass Mordin as he exchanges a wry comment with Jacob; nods to Jack as she looks up from a whispered discussion with Samara._

_Massani looks uncomfortable as she walks past him, glances involuntarily at the small shroud in the corner hastily draped over Thane. Behind him, watching from the shadows as always, Kasumi looks concerned as well. In hindsight, perhaps, it was a mistake to leave Massani in charge of the reserve team. Experienced though he was, he was at heart too much of an outsider, always _

_But she doesn't blame him - it was her decision to hand him the responsibility. Her mistake And both she and Thane had known the risks. Only last night, he'd told her that he'd begun to - she cuts the thought off, vision beginning to tremble._

Enough, _she tells herself firmly. Tears can come later. She's not a child, and she still has a job to do._

_Garrus is the only choice to lead the rearguard holding the door, of course. He's doesn't want to do it - still doesn't think he can lead, after everything that happened on Omega - but she knows him well enough to know that he'll cope. She trusted him to make the right decision about Sidonis back on the Citadel, and she trusts him to make the right decisions now. She read the dossier Liara dug up for her on Hagalaz, but all it made her realise was that the old Shadow Broker had been an idiot._

"_Good luck," she tells him, quietly enough to be sure that nobody else can hear her. "Keep them safe."_

_Then she's heading up to the control room, Tali and Legion either side of her. It seems absurd, she knows, but a part of her can't help but hope that the experience of fighting together, side by side, will bring the quarian and the geth closer together. Just one geth platform and one quarian doesn't sound like much, after centuries of warfare and mutual incomprehension, but at least it would be a start. _

_Never mind that neither of them are likely to be alive in an hour's time._

_Thane would understand, she thinks. She never quite grasped the intricacies of the drell's philosophy, but she thinks she gets a part of it now. The galaxy can hurt her, but it can't change who she is._

_But up in the control room, in the centre of the Collector base, she's reminded that the galaxy will keep trying to do just that, whatever her resolve._

* * *

"We expected something like this," Legion's synthetic voice echoed strangely in the vaulting chambers.

In the heart of the base, orbiting the forgotten graves of ancient dead stars, the Collectors had given birth to an abomination. A twisted synthesis of organic and artificial life. _Is this the fate Sovereign promised you in exchange for collaboration, Saren? _From where she's standing, oblivion seems a kinder end.

In her earpiece, she listened as EDI ran through estimates of the numbers involved; of how many colonists had been sacrificed at this altar so far and how many more deaths would be needed to complete the Collector's work. The numbers were almost incomprehensibly large; industrialised slaughter on a scale the human mind could hardly expect to grasp.

She wondered if she was supposed to be impressed. Maybe the dead woman they thought she was would have been, once. She wasn't sure she knew what the woman would have thought anymore.

All she knew was that she had a gun in her hand and an enemy in front of her. Then another enemy, then another. And that was all she needed to know.

Even as the first three Collector drones fell away, a dozen more flew up towards them. They met they same fate as their comrades. As they fought, Grunt bellowed ancient krogan war cries, boasts and threats while she and the machine moved beside him in almost total silence; a silence she broke only occasionally to snap out terse orders.

And still the Collectors kept coming. Flashes of light and screams confirmed the presence of their master, the Harbinger.

_**I know you feel this**_, the creature's voice insisted, echoes reverberating strangely in the back of her skull. It was meant to be a threat, but it was really an admission of weakness, a sign that this Harbinger was not all-knowing. It was almost enough to make her smile.

The truth was she didn't feel a thing.

Finally it was done. The Collector drones were dead or dying; the skeletal monstrosity they'd been building thrown down into the depths below; the voice in her head at last fallen silent. _Time to blow this place to hell_, she thought.

She risked a glance at her companions. Legion seemed ... intact. _Undamaged_, she imagined Tali putting it, witheringly. For a fleeting instant she wishes Tali were here. But if wishing had ever helped anyone, the galaxy would be a very different place.

The geth was fine, but Grunt looked pale, almost visibly swaying as she turned to inspect him.

"Still on my feet, Battlemaster," the krogan insisted, despite the blood visibly seeping from the web of cracks in his armour. If they couldn't get to a med-bay soon, she didn't think his chances were good, even with the krogan regenerative abilities. Even as she watched his eyes seemed to lose some of their focus.

"Good fight," he muttered quietly, almost under his breath.. "Good … fight."

_There are more fights to come, _she thinks. _This isn't the end of it. Not for either of us_. She doesn't say it out loud though. She doesn't want to be proven a liar.

Joker's voice echoed suddenly in her earpiece, breaking the stillness of the moment.

"Uh, Commander," the pilot said, sounding nonplussed. "Message for you."

The Illusive Man. He had to be burning through a fortune in credits to be able to reach them here, holographic image flickering slightly in the dark, a worried frown on his face. She wondered if this was why Cerberus had gone to all the effort of installing the QEC channel on the new _Normandy_. Was it just to give their founder the option to instantaneously speak to her now, across an impossible chasm ten thousand light years wide? She wondered what he thought he could say that she might find of interest.

"Commander," he said, voice sounding more urgent than she remembers hearing it before. "This is a tremendous opportunity for humanity…"

* * *

_The Illusive Man is waiting for a response. He expects her to decide … what?_

_She'd started out with a clear focus, a single purpose. Protect the human colonies and save the abducted colonists. If the Council wouldn't do this, if the Alliance's resources were stretched too thin, then it was up to her. Whoever she had to work it and whatever compromises she had to make along the way. Surely that was reason enough to have cheated death; reason enough to have scratched and crawled her way back to the world of living._

_Only she isn't sure what's left of that mission now.. The Collector vessel is destroyed; the thing they were building here from the wreckage and remnants of human lives thrown down into the abyss. But the colonists she'd hoped to rescue are dead, not even bodies to be buried.. _

_So what's left? _Avenge the fallen_, she thinks automatically. _Fight for the lost. _It's what she's been trying to do ever since she woke up after Alchera. _But_ after everything that's happened, after everything she's seen, can she still afford to compromise?_

_She thinks about Ashley, who she'd left behind to die on Virmire during the hunt for Saren two years ago. _I wish you'd been on Horizon, Ash, _she thinks sadly_. I wish you'd been on the Normandy with Joker and me.

_But the truth, she knows, is that Ashley would have no more worked with Cerberus than Kaiden would have. Whatever her views on aliens had been when they first met, she'd seen too much of Cerberus's handiwork to ever countenance working with them. _And what about you? _a familiar voice seems to whisper in the dark_. You saw their labs on Binthu and Nepheron too. Didn't you? _Maybe it's Ashley's voice. She knows what the Chief would tell her to do._

_She lets herself think about Thane, too. _The Universe is a dark place,_ he'd said when they first properly talked. He'd been trying to make it brighter before he, before - she shook her head. Well, that was something she could try too. But how could she be sure if her actions would make the galaxy brighter or simply commit it to the flames? Could she accept the Illusive Man's advice without becoming complicit in the very evil she'd set out to defeat?_

If you kill a man with a gun, do you hold the gun responsible?_ He'd asked her that, on a day that already feels long past. And of course she didn't - a gun was just a tool, a weapon. A gun couldn't know the difference between right and wrong._

_Mordin had shown her the results of his tests on the Collector bodies. How what was left of the Prothean species had been emptied, hollowed out by the Reapers to act as their instruments in the galaxy. It was one of the few times she'd seem him angry. The Collectors were just tools, too: mindless, soulless. Blameless, maybe. It was Harbinger who she blamed for what the Collectors had done to the colonists, Harbinger's choices that had brought them to this point._

_She thinks she knows what Thane would want her to do as well. And Pressly and Admiral Kahoku and all the other people she's lost. _

_But it's so hard to be sure of anything now._

_For a few seconds, the halls in the Collector base are silent except for the sound of Tali's whirring suit filters and her own ragged breath. How many lives hang in the balance now? Billions, surely. More: the lives of every organic in the galaxy, everybody alive now or who will - or won't - be born in the decades and centuries to come. Born into the galaxy that her actions today will help to shape. No wonder that she hesitates, then, that she feels herself being watched, the judgement of future histories weighing her down oppressively. _

_But finally, she makes her decision._

* * *

The Illusive Man expected her to argue. That might have made her laugh, once.

But she'd already made her decision.


End file.
